“On Monday, New York City’s Fox affiliate ran a segment about the record-breaking sale of Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (version O), a modern masterpiece that was auctioned off for $179.35 million (including the commission paid to Christie’s). Like many of Picasso’s paintings, the work featured some female nudity, albeit of the Cubist variety—which the station decided to censor.

Inspired by the station’s expert blurring, we (Slate) decided to see what other masterpieces of art history would look like if censored by an overzealous local news channel.”

THE PENDULUM: WHY AMERICANS SHOULD CARE THAT BRITISH PORN IS FUCKED

By Malin James

A few day ago, British pornographers were quietly hit with draconian new regulations. The UK’s new Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 are aimed at “Video on Demand,” ie: porn on the internet, which is now subject to the same restrictions as porn sold on DVD. As of December 1st, all pornographic content produced in the UK must adhere to the British Board of Film Classification’s rating of R-18, which falls roughly between the NC-17 and X ratings in the U.S. Click here for a full list of the newly banned sexual acts, accompanied by elucidating commentary from obscenity lawyer, Myles Jackman. The ban is fairly extensive, so here are a few highlights from the list of banned sexual acts, courtesy of The Independent.

According to the new restrictions, it is no longer legal for porn produced in the UK to portray spanking, caning, physical restraint, verbal or physical abuse (regardless of consent), humiliation, female ejaculation, face-sitting and fisting. The BBFC banned the last two items on the list on the grounds that they are “potentially life-endangering.”

Really? Interesting…. I’ll remember that the next time I want to take someone’s life in my hands.

There have been a number of excellent articles and essays published in the wake of these regulations that cover the many reasons why the new standards are problematic and discriminatory on multiple levels. Girl on the Net wrote an impassioned break down of the regulation’s idiocy, sex act by sex act. (I especially appreciated her pointing out the ironies inherent in the restrictions). Pandorah Blake addressed the regulations as one of the independent porn producers whose livelihood is going to be directly effected by the ban. Remittance Girl addressed the BBFC’s overblown exercise of governmental power, and Stavvers examined the disturbing manner in which the restrictions target women’s sexuality and sexual pleasure, as well many aspects of the kink / minority / fetish sexualities, while leaving mainstream / male pornographic tropes far less restricted. For example, while face-sitting is banned as potentially life-threatening, face fuckingis just fine. I’d encourage anyone interested in learning more about the BBFC’s new standards to check any of those articles out, or to go to the Backlash website, an organization committed to defending freedom of sexual expression.

It hasn’t gotten quite so much coverage in the U.S. In fact, apart from an excellent article in Reason, it’s barely registered here. So, why does an erotica writer living in the United States care any all this? After all, it’s not as if people can’t spank each other or sit on their loved one’s faces in the comfort and privacy of their own homes, right? They just can’t see it in porn. Besides, that’s all happening an ocean away. We’re sitting pretty behind the First Amendment here. What does it really matter?

After three days of sitting with that question, I’ve come up with two answers. The first is more general so I’ll start there. I care because our culture, (meaning Western / European culture), moves like a pendulum. Periods of great conservatism are often followed by decades of social progress. Look at the turn of the 20th century when Victorian morality slowly gave way to the Roaring 20’s, a period fueled by popular resistance to prohibition. Consider the way the pendulum swung back to social conservatism in the years following World War II, when sexual and emotional repression became the standard way of life. That repression persisted until the rise of feminism and the sexual revolution pushed the pendulum back towards liberalism in the 60’s and 70’s. Still not convinced? How about the fiscal conservatism in the 80’s that lead to a popular culture that was both totally decadent and oddly repressed, particularly in the wake of AIDS. Then the nineties came around and the LGBT community mobilized, ushering in new struggles and discussions and efforts at re-education centering on sexual freedoms. And now here we are, in a relatively progressive, sex positive age where bondage is out of the closet and people buy 50 Shades of Grey in Walmart. But what does that even mean?

It means a lot changed very quickly, and we are now hitting up against cultural resistance.

Yes, sex positive efforts at education and advocacy are still active, now more than ever. In fact, they’ve expanded to include most marginalized sexualities, gender identifications and sexual kinks, including, but certainly not limited to, BDSM and D/s practices. But that doesn’t mean the pendulum can’t swing to the other way, back to a “safer,” less sexually challenging mode. I believe that the tighter porn restriction in the UK are one sign, (one of many small, subtle indicators), that it is already swinging back to what I will uncomfortably call “moral conservatism.”

The reasoning behind the restrictions is embedded in the language of the BBFC’s new regulations, and that reasoning boils down to this:

Spanking and Female Ejaculation: Everything Good Is Bad Again

By Remittance Girl

This week the new Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 aimed at censoring On Demand Video in the UK were ratified. I can’t say I watch a lot of porn of any kind, and my personal opinions of the remediated acts listed in the regulations range from a shrug to a shudder. There are lots of things I’m not interested in seeing and, because I have free will, I can choose not to see them. However, I do have a conceptual problem with the regulations for a number of reasons.

They purport to be necessary to ‘save our children’ from seeing terrible things and, it is implied, becoming warped by them. (I don’t want to get into the discussion of all the awful non-sexual things they might see on the news, in the theatres, on TV) There are many, many things that children should not see, both in the media and in real life, and it is the obligation of a parent to make sure they don’t see them. State intrusion into the making of cultural product ‘for the sake of the children’ is denying the very real and important responsibility that parents should exercise themselves. Governments that do it end up creating a population that feels itself able to relieve itself of this important aspect of parenting and growth that should be a matter between parents and their children.

Although not explicitly stated, the regulations infer that there is empirical evidence that children who watch, say, a woman sitting on a man’s face, are more likely to be psychologically and socially affected by it that, for instance, seeing 10 men ejaculating on a woman. There is NO creditable research to this effect. Now, I don’t want to suggest its time to kick the net-nanny to the curb. There is some – not a lot – of research to indicate that exposure to extreme types of violent pornography might be psychologically problematic (Flood 2003) but, frankly, the conclusion is based on a lot of assumptions and not a great deal of solid research. The irony of the discussion is that, since it would be illegal to expose under 18s to porn, it’s almost impossible to get hard data on what the effects of it are.

In the absence of any solid, scientific data, let us be responsible about what our kids our watching, yes? Seems sensible. But in order to do that, we would have to play an active role in how our children formed their thinking about sex. Since, as a society, we are so hell bent on pretending children HAVE no sexuality, thereby neatly absolving parents from their roles as good sex educators, we’re letting the government do it for us? That can’t end well – for many, many reasons.

Meanwhile, the list of prohibited acts on VOD and the rationale behind them remains stunningly puzzling. I don’t agree with the censoring of any of the acts (as long as the actors are of age, consenting and the viewers are equally of age and consenting) but some are actually laughable.

No spanking.

Although, according to Debra Lynne Herbenick PhD, of the Kinsey Instituted, it is assumed to be a very, very common form of sexual play (Washington Post). On an admittedly anecdotal basis, I don’t even KNOW anyone who has not at least tried it once. When regulations don’t reflect some semblance of agreement with what ‘normative’ people do in the bedroom, the regulators stop simply looking like over-zealous prudes; they take on something a little more sinister. Is this an attempt to socially engineer a view of sexuality formed in the image of their own fantasies?

The second newly prohibited act is the remediation of female ejaculation. It’s not totally prohibited: only if it gets on anyone else’s body. Why, you ask? Because according to this learned group of censors, it’s watersports in disguise. They maintain that since female ejaculation may contain some urine in it, there’s no difference between a squirting scene and a golden shower.

It does tell you something about how utterly tone deaf these people are to the nuances of sexual semiotics that they equate the two. Not that I personally have a problem with either of the acts.

But let us not be disingenuous. Golden showers always carry, however subtly, the implication of degradation about them. The person being urinated on is, from a sexual power dynamic, usually the ‘bottom’ in the scene. That’s why people find them hot.

Squirting, meanwhile, is rarely semiotically degrading to the person who gets ‘squirted on’. It happens to have emerged, for better or for worse, as a symbol of extreme pleasure in an orgasming woman. If anything, there is some flavour of the helplessness in the throws of pleasure of the woman doing the squirting.

But also, what is this obsession with the urine content?

This is where it gets personal for me. Many women don’t experience female ejaculation, but I do. Not after one or two orgasms, but past the third, it is likely to happen. I honestly don’t know what’s in it. It doesn’t smell like urine, but I’m more than willing to admit there might be some in there. When I was younger, the prospect that there might be terrified me. I would forcefully stop a lover from giving me more than two orgasms for fear I would squirt. And, of course, due to the fact that one squirts during orgasms, there’s a very good chance that you will get it on your partner, and all over the bed. But it is a natural consequence of my body reaction. It is not obscene, or perverse, and it certainly WOULDN’T damage a child to see it (anymore than a glimpse at anything else they shouldn’t be watching).

It took me many years to get over the fear of it. It took me a long time to grapple and settle on the reality that sex is messy and involves a LOT of body fluids: saliva, mucus, semen, effluvia, urine, even blood sometimes, and … wait for it… shit too. I can assure you that there are microscopic fragments of feces on every cock caught on camera penetrating an anus, and the censors haven’t banned THAT, why?

But, from a purely gendered perspective – why is it socially acceptable to have video of semen all over the place, but not female ejaculation? Why is it fine to show women choking on cock, but not women sitting on a man’s face? Now the legislation doesn’t simply seem prudish, it looks downright sexist!

Look, from a erotic writing perspective, I’m thrilled they’re banning things. Banning stuff just makes it more transgressive and hotter. The writer in me says: heck, ban it all! Ban ankles. I can write a great erotic story about calves!

EBOOK – “SenSexual: A Unique Anthology 2013”

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4 Videos Below-Readings are only recorded at the request of the presenter.

Monica Day performance/reading two poems: The Fifth Year and This is My Body for January 2013 Erotic Literary Salon
M. Dante reading SKIN dedicated to the art and inspiration of Heide Hatry for December 2013 Erotic Literary Salon
Frances' reading,“Go the Fok to Sleep”
Dr. Susana Mayer’s NBC10 interview of “50 Shades of Grey”